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A bio-diverse culture needs us to be diverse, which is to say we need to be intrinsically ourselves - rooted in place and within our skills - and working as part of the whole. Coming from a broad frequency band, rather from a narrow, seperated point of view. This is a new way of working in the world: one that combines a modern city intelligence with an ancestral knowledge of the land.

At the risk of exasperating my crisis-fatigued colleagues in the Transition Movement, here’s a collapse scenario, not inconsistent with those of many researchers, scientists, historians, economists and theorists who’ve looked at peak oil, runaway global warming, economic depressions and the history of civilizations.

I've met a lot of people who lived all or much of their lives with very little power, and seen their homes, and I have ample visual evidence that often life can be quite graciously lived with little or no gas, electricity, and other inputs. The critical difference between a life lived graciously with little, and one without is the realm of how resources - whether land or fossil fuels or whatever - are used collectively. Thus, I'd like to propose what I think is an important and useful distinction - between public use of energy and resources and private use of energy resources. The former, I would argue, is essential to maintaining a good life, the latter is not.

The first morning of the 9th ASPO conference in Brussels had a good presentation of what we know today about climate change. But the IPCC vision is not the same as that of ASPO and the contrast flared during the panel discussion, when Kjell Aleklett, president of ASPO, accused van Ypersele and IPCC of following a "business as usual" approach. Having neglected peak oil (and peak fuels) in their scenarios, Aleklett said, the IPCC was presenting unrealistic and excessively pessimistic predictions of global warming.

Civilisation is a story. It is a story about where we have come from and where we are going. There are many ways to tell that story, but one version has been very much the dominant one in the West for the past couple of centuries. We know this story: it’s the one about modern, urban industrial culture’s ineffable superiority over all others; the one about human evolution leading inevitably to this point. It’s the one about winning the war against nature, being the only species which thinks and loves and dreams; it’s the one about machines and circuitry and ingenuity and progress. And it’s true, in some ways, at least as far as it goes. But it may not be going much further.

Put these things together -- a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems -- and what do we have?

How do you do all this and still conduct a “normal” life? That’s exactly the point: You don’t. At some time within the next few months or years, circumstances will be such that you will relinquish the feeble attempts to hang onto that gluttonous consumption, compete-with-the-Jones’s (or “keep the kids competitive” with the Jones’s kids), go-go-go life rhythm. You’ll begin to get real.

Why is it that the commons is so often excluded from official policy discussions about how to manage resources and improve people’s lives? This strikes me as a serious void in our public conversations, one that we desperately need to correct.

Nobody writes about class in America and about America’s unacknowledged class war like Joe Bageant. Dubbed the “Sartre of Appalachia,” Joe writes about America’s largest, yet invisible to most, class -- 60 million poor, undereducated white laborers. These are the folks who as Joe notes are on the other side of “the shower line” -- those who pull off their sweaty work clothes and take their showers after their back-breaking day’s physical labor as opposed to those who shower and dress far more finely before heading off to work.

Instead of waiting for a crisis to force these changes upon us, kicking and screaming, could we use social force multipliers - new attitudes, expectations, and behaviors - to transform these "unthinkable drastic measures" of conservation and efficiency into positive social ideals?

Talking to people here, it doesn’t seem like people are all that concerned about jobs, about creating jobs out of this. Whereas I think in most parts of the world that’s the first question – how am I going to make a living? Seeing that this could be an opportunity not just for a healthier life with more community connection but that there could be more economic stability than they currently have. That would be a major motivator.

Nobody knows how to define "permaculture." Everyone thinks they should be doing it. Lisa Fernandes starts the process of deconstructing one of the most common definitions for a system that thousands are touting as a response to peak oil and climate change.

It’s not that you are discounting yourself - it’s that the personal you with all its small indulgences, its interiorities and subjective biographical events is turned inside out suddenly and asked to be someone else. Someone who acts within the bigger picture. Your own Spring uprising.

My own argument, which I've been making for some years, and which has come to have some little currency in at least some areas of agricultural planning, is that we should turn it around and presume failure. That is, we should ask ourselves "what strategies are most effective and least risky in failure situations...given that systems failures happen all the time."...It creates, in the end a different way of looking at our world, and one, I would argue, we desperately need.